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I like to think of Art with a capitol A as art-art: that is, museum bound, commodity art that reinforces - and embodies - the values of the late-capitalistic status quo. The art of the future is different, something hybrid and hyphenated that we already see in much of today's best art. I'm referring to public art, feminist art, AIDS-art, eco-art, media-art, net art, community-based art, queer art, political art - all those varieties of art that have been demeaned with the modifying adjective distinguishing them from just plain ol' art-art. I take these modifiers as a badge of honor like queer; it signifies that such art speaks to a broader, multi-faceted public.
What follows are some mission statements / manifestos from my own projects. They represent a vision of the role of art and artists in contemporary society and they attempt to apply theory - and many years of observation - to practice. Case studies are often the best teachers and "Do It Yourself" is usually the best modus operandi.
911 - THE SEPTEMBER 11 PROJECT: CULTURAL INTERVENTION IN CIVIC SOCIETY
> visit me >>">www.rhizome.org/911
Artists/cultural workers are knowledge makers and engaged citizens. They are experts at creatively utilizing their hybrid skills to reach numerous audiences - from school children and people on the street to gallery-goers and far-flung electronic audiences - with meaningful "messages" ranging from healing images and narratives to analyses of mass-media imagery and manipulation. The traditional view of art's potential in this crisis was expressed in the New York Times of September 17 in which the pleasures of art were described as "comfort, replenishment, beauty", the museum as "a calm haven from devastating events", and the future direction of public art as a return to the memorial, and a turning away from the "humorous or ironic".
... Art can also open up avenues of expression for discussion of hasty military / political action and conditions that encourage terrorism, offer emotional solace and intellectual engagement through art and other programming, and create a community of concern about issues that extend beyond the mainstream gallery-museum nexus.
The SEPTEMBER 11 PROJECT is a response to an emergency that is designed to be open-ended and evolving. Its art-world predecessors include the pedagogical impulses of Joseph Beuys manifested in the Free University, collaboratively-oriented "think-tanking" approach of facilities such as Carnegie-Mellon's Studio for Creative Inquiry or MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies, and the political engagement of the Art Workers' Coalition, PADD (Political Art Documentation and Distribution) and Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America. Perhaps more to the point in our networked era are the activities of "Visual AIDS" which functioned as a volunteer-run umbrella organization, information hub and presenter.
... In a monolithic media culture, it is imperative that more diverse voices be heard.
THE MEDIA CHANNEL
> visit me >>">www.mediachannel.org/arts
What is media art? Artists have always trained their sights on their surroundings. A century ago, forward-looking artists surveyed the new industrial scene. Today, many artists are responding to the Information-Age mediascape enveloping us. To do so, they are appropriating mass media such as billboards, advertising posters, video, photography, and the Internet, together with traditional media such as painting. Media art critiques the mass media, advertising, and the new communications technologies that shape our lives, as well as the related themes our media culture invokes, such as censorship and celebrity.
As up to date as Media Art is, it already has a history: It has been around since at least 1970, when the artist Les Levine coined the term ... . Many of today's media artworks utilize the interactive and community-building capabilities of the Internet. Such interactivity empowers viewers to participate in the creation of an artwork which might never be finished. In the Digital Age, the notion of authorship, like so many once-stable concepts, is being redefined. Media Channel regards art as another medium in the age of mass media. To borrow a term from the German philosopher Hans Magnus Enzensberger, art is part of the "consciousness industry", alongside the output of Hollywood, Madison Avenue and the news cartels.
THE CENTER FOR HYBRID ART SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY EXPERIMENTATION
The 1960s saw the burgeoning of hybrid art-science-technology experimentation embodied in the creation of new kinds of artwork and support for them from research facilities such as MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies (the first of its kind, established in 1968) and Carnegie Mellon's STUDIO for Creative Inquiry as well as related individual and corporate-sponsored undertakings such as Billy Kluver / Robert Rauschenberg's EAT (Experiments in Art & Technology) and Xerox PARC's Pair Program, respectively. - Related initiatives also exist outside the U. S., including IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique) in Paris, Gifu in Japan, and ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie) in Karlsruhe, Germany. - Such facilities bring together artists, scientists, technologists and (sometimes) community members to create pioneering research-based artwork. In the case of the STUDIO, these range from environmental reclamation projects to multi-media, educational presentations for domed planetariums.
These hybrid efforts have always remained outside the commodity-driven mainstream art world. Yet the history of twentieth-century art is the history of boundary breaking and blurring. The twenty-first century brings unprecedented interest in the new, hybrid social and creative environment, resulting in the centrality of digital methods to contemporary arts practices. Ironically, this expanded interest has not been accompanied by expanded interpretive information. Without online archiving and the distribution of precious historical materials from such hybrid arts-research centers, how can today's technologically oriented students learn about the hybrid-art-science-technology experimentation of the past? How can instructors teach this material without these resources? And, within the ecosystem that is the art world, how can critics and scholars respond to innovative art without intellectual grounding in this tradition?
ARTERY: THE AIDS-ARTS FORUM
www.artistswithaids.org/artery
Artery's mission is to examine both the history of the AIDS crisis and its changing face as reflected in the arts. At Artery, we believe that the arts can enlarge the dialogue about AIDS and contemporary society. Artery's audiences are multiple: contemporary artists and art buffs, people living with AIDS as well as the broad publics interested in today's history, culture and its defining issues. As one of the participants in Artery's first symposium observed: "The influence of AIDS-related art is huge - too large to see clearly and yet pervasive". AIDS may be the Vietnam of the eighties and the need for places to discuss relevant issues and express conflicted feelings has hardly abated over time.
ART-ART IS DEAD: LONG LIVE HYBRID-ART!
Robert Atkins
New York
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